When René DeCartes theorized that mind and body separately compose each of us, he had no idea his dichotomy would impact gender so profoundly.  Today Dualism is our dominant discourse, but the mind and body are not merely separate. The two are often at odds; our bodies and minds alike pitted against their gendered opposite.  This dichotomy is hierarchical, just as man and woman are assigned cultural value. Despite the troubling manifestation of patriarchy in this seemingly innocuous anatomy, new research validates the stories of psychological and corporal damage women have historically experienced through Cartesian Dualism.  While this research is new to some, it enlightens us to what those persecuted by bodies and minds “marked” via gender have known and lived for centuries.  Additional scholars argue this categorization of mind and body influences everything from our gender performance to our ability to critically read a text.  Through the use of feminist-vegetarian theory, feminist literary criticism, and embodied cognition, I gather academic perspectives challenging Dualism in order to highlight the elaborate detriment it causes for one of the primary protagonists in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.